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In the 1960s and 1970s the study of history and sociology was heavily influenced by Marxism and theories of class. But the collapse of Communism and significant changes in culture and society threw the study of class into crisis. Its most basic premises were called into question. More recently accelerating globalisation, proliferating multinational corporations and unbridled free-market capitalism have given the study of class a new significance and caused historians and sociologists to revisit the debate.This book looks at the changes that caused the crisis in the study of class and shows how

Whether or not there is a continuing class struggle in China today is of great importance not only to the future of that people's republic but also to leftist movements around the world. The issue of the possibility of the persistence of classes after the advent to state power of socialists was largely ignored by 19th century leftists as either too conjectural or indeterminable. In the USSR, the class struggle was declared ended in 1961 when a "state of the whole people" was proclaimed. But in China, the class struggle was recognized as persisting during the Cultural Revolution starting in 1966. The Sino-Soviet conflict embraces these differences. If socialist states are on the developmental path to communism, which can only be a world-system, then the elimination of basic economic disparities between parts of the world & within countries is a prerequisite, according to the Chinese. Hence the USSR, if it is truly committed to realizing communism, would have to assist nonindustrialized countries in their historic struggle to overcome underdevelopment. The relevance of this debate to the leftist movements concerns relations between forces in an interdependent world. If the USSR & China remain within the single capitalist world-economy, then these states with centralized planning, state ownership of productive property, & socialist parties in power do not represent a second, separate socialist world-system. These countries are not experiencing "communism" or "socialism" but rather reflect how rapid industrialization can be achieved by groups wielding state power. Among these groups & parties, there are "Left" & "Right" wings corresponding to the continuing class struggle over the operations of these levers of potential change within the capitalist controlled world-economy. A. Karmen.

The analysis of a class formation is only possible if situated in a concrete understanding of the historically determined process of social production. in order to understand the relations between classes— that is, between the many who labour and the few who appropriate the fruits of that labour, the specific forms of appropriation and the political and ideological means used to secure and support it, and the class antagonisms and struggles arising therefrom—we need to grasp the social formation as a single whole. moreover, in dealing with colonial or "underdeveloped" countries, we must also have some understanding of how their whole system of production has, right. from the start of the colonial era, been constituted (or restructured) to serve the ends of imperialist exploistation. it is from this standpoint that this study of class formation and class struggle in "modern" uganda is presented, though it deals mainly with the period after 1962 when the country became formally independent. the two major high‐tides of class struggle upon which the analysis is concentrated are, first, the rising antagonism and conflict between the asian commercial bourgeoisie and the african petit‐bourgeoisie seen as the focal point of the crisis of the colonial system, and, secondly, the growing fragmentation and factionalism within the african petit‐bourgeoisie itself as the focal point of the crisis of the neo‐colonial system in the period since independence. there is also a brief discussion of the way in which, both before and since independence, the politics of the working class have been absorbed, suppressed, and otherwise "neutralized", for the time being, by the politics of the rampant petit‐bourgeoisie.

Discussion begins with a look at the New York Times's historical interest in income inequality, beginning with 1980 and the Reagan years. After a lull in this kind of reporting for the Times, in 2001, when another Republican president, the younger Bush, was in office, the Times levied the charge that the middle class was vanishing. This is asserted to be untrue. In fact, those reported to be suffering under Bush's policies voted for him in 2004. In this context, the claims in the Times' series Class Matters, which pursues an economic-based explanation for why so many poor and working-class Americans betray their own interests when voting, are critically assessed.